Ted & Me

by Dan Gutman

  I was starting to feel light-headed. It was like I was entering weightlessness. I lay back on my pillow. The tingling feeling was on my other side now, and I could begin to feel it moving down my legs.

  This must be what it’s like to be hypnotized, I thought. To be in a trance. To meditate.

  I reached the point where I couldn’t drop the card even if I wanted to. It was like when you pass the halfway point in a trip, and it would take longer to turn back and drive home than it would to keep going to your destination. The point of no return.

  I felt like I was giving off a glow, but I didn’t dare open my eyes to see it.

  The indentation made by my body in the bed was smoothing out. I was getting lighter. Everything was starting to vibrate. The tingling sensation was all over me. I took a deep breath, like I was about to swim underwater.

  And then I disappeared.

  6

  Oh, !@#$%!

  WHEN I OPENED MY EYES, I WAS FLAT ON MY STOMACH IN near darkness surrounded by piles of junk. There was a loud roaring all around me—like the sound of a jet engine—and everything was vibrating. I didn’t see a window, so I couldn’t tell where I was. It was freezing cold. I felt like I might be locked in the trunk of a really old car.

  What was I doing here?

  In the dim light, I squinted to look at the stuff scattered around me. There was a flashlight, a whistle, a Swiss army knife, a compass, some flares, a first aid kit, and a bottle of shark repellent. Shark repellent?! This was survival gear. The cover of the map had one word on it: “KOREA.” That’s when I realized what was going on.

  I was in a plane.

  Something must have gone horribly wrong. All the other times I had traveled through time with a baseball card, I wound up somewhere near the player on the card. But now I was up in the air, going who knows where. I should have taken Flip’s advice, I said to myself. This was a big mistake.

  It had to be a very small plane. A couple of feet in front of me was the back of the pilot’s seat. I could see the top of his helmet, and I crawled about five feet forward toward him. There wasn’t a lot of room because of the stuff all over. With the noise from the engines, I guess he didn’t hear me.

  “Uh, excuse me…” I said, tapping the pilot on his shoulder.

  “Holy !@#$%!” he said, jumping even though he was strapped tightly into his seat. “Who the !@#$%! are you?”

  The guy sure had a mouth on him. I’d heard the curse words before, of course, but most grown-ups try to watch their language around kids. I couldn’t blame him, though. If I was flying a plane by myself and some kid came out of nowhere and suddenly tapped me on the shoulder, I would freak out too.

  The pilot turned his head around to look at me. He looked familiar. He had curly dark hair under his helmet and bushy eyebrows.

  “M-My name is J-Joe Stoshack,” I stammered. “I’m a—”

  “You’re a kid!” he shouted in my face, his voice booming. “How the !@#$%! did you get in here?”

  “I…don’t know,” I sputtered. “It was an accident. I—I didn’t mean to. I just—who are you?”

  “Captain Theodore Williams,” he replied. “United States Marines.”

  I just about lost it. Of course he looked familiar to me. He looked just like the photos I had seen of him.

  “You’re Ted Williams?”

  “Look, Junior,” he replied. “I got no time for chit-chat and autographs. I don’t know how you got in here, but I have a mission to accomplish. So sit back and keep your mouth shut. I’ll deal with you after we land.”

  He turned back around to scan the sky in front of him. He was controlling the plane with a stick, sort of like the joysticks they have in video game arcades.

  “I have a mission to accomplish too,” I told him. “I live in the twenty-first century, and I can travel through time with baseball cards. I came here to warn President Roosevelt about Pearl Harbor. I’m going to prevent the attack—”

  “Pearl Harbor? Roosevelt?” Ted said, turning around to look at me again. The words exploded from his mouth. “Are you out of your !@#$%! mind? Roosevelt has been dead for eight years!”

  “That’s impossible!” I shouted. “What year is it?”

  “Give me a break, Junior,” Ted said. “It’s 1953. Pearl Harbor happened 12 years ago. That war is long over. They found us a new war to fight.”

  I rooted around on the floor until I found the Ted Williams card I had used to get there. I always travel to the year on the card. But looking at it closely, I couldn’t find a year printed on it anywhere.

  I realized what had happened. The FBI agent must have given me a 1953 card instead of a 1941 card! I never bothered to check it. I just assumed FBI agents knew what they were doing. After all, they’re the FBI!

  “Is this the Vietnam War?” I asked Ted.

  “Vietnam?” he shouted back at me. “What the !@#$%! are you talking about? We’re in Korea, Junior. Look, I’m gonna say this just one time, so listen up good. Once we get over the target in Kyiomipo, I’m gonna be dropping a 3,000-pound load of napalm on a Commie supply center. Then we hightail it out of there. Got it? I got no time for babysitting, so keep your mouth shut and let me do my job. My opinion is not open to debate!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I pushed myself forward until I was right behind the pilot’s seat. Now I could see out the canopy window. It was a bright, clear day with a few clouds in the sky. On our left and right, there were lots of other American bombers flying alongside us. There could have been dozens of them. If all those planes were going to be dropping bombs, I wouldn’t want to be on the ground looking up.

  We continued for the next few minutes in tense silence, with Ted talking pilot mumbo jumbo into his radio to the other planes. I had a lot of questions to ask, but I didn’t want to get him angry, so I kept quiet.

  “It’s time,” he finally said. “Find something to hold on to, Junior. We’re going in, and this could get a little bumpy.”

  I grabbed a handle on the wall next to me. He pushed the stick forward. The nose of the plane tilted down, and we went into a dive. It was a really steep angle. The engines roared. For a moment, I felt weightless as we dropped through the clouds. If I hadn’t been holding on, the g-force would have pushed me against the ceiling. On the dashboard—or whatever you call it on a plane—the altimeter dipped below 2,000 feet. I felt my ears pop. I could see the ground coming up at us. Ted pushed a button, and there was a rumbling sound coming from below.

  “Bomb bay doors open!” Ted shouted into the radio. “I’m north of the 38th parallel, 15 miles from Pyongyang. Bombs away!”

  Ted pushed another button, and a moment later I felt the plane swoop upward. I was pressed against the floor now. He must have dropped his bombs, and that made the plane a lot lighter. I heard a sound like bullets hitting metal.

  “Too low,” Ted mumbled.

  “What’s happening?” I shouted.

  “They’re shooting at us!” he barked. “What the !@#$%! do you expect? You shoot at them, and they get to shoot back. That’s why they call it war.”

  We were banking into a turn now as if we were making a run for it. There was a beeping sound, and I looked over Ted’s shoulder to see lights flashing on the dashboard.

  “What does that mean?” I asked hesitantly.

  “The wheels are down,” he replied.

  “Is that bad?”

  “It is if you’re not about to land,” he said. “The hydraulics may be leaking. We took some flak back there.”

  Ted pressed some more buttons, and the wheels came back up. He breathed a sigh of relief, but then the stick he was using to control the plane began to shake wildly in his hand.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “Will you shut the !@#$%! up, Junior?” he shouted back at me. “You wanna die here?”

  Ted began yelling into the radio, trying to contact the other pilots.

  “Antiaircraft fire! We’ve been hit! Plane is
wounded. Mayday! I’m hit! The radio is dead.”

  Every light was flashing red, and the dashboard was blinking like a Christmas tree. I could see buttons labeled LOW FUEL and FIRE.

  Oh, no. I had been in some tough situations before, but not like this. I had even been shot at before but never while I was in danger of falling out of the sky.

  I knew traveling through time would catch up with me eventually. Something bad was bound to happen. It was just a matter of time. I felt tears welling up in my eyes.

  “Are we going to die?” I asked quietly.

  “It’s a distinct possibility,” Ted said as the plane leveled off. “I gotta abort the flight plan. We need to get over some water, fast. I’m heading for the Yellow Sea. I may have to hit the silk.”

  He took off his leg straps and seat belt.

  “Hit the silk? You mean eject?” I asked. “We’re going to parachute out?”

  “No, I’m gonna parachute out,” he said. You think I carry two parachutes in case unexpected company shows up? You’ll be on your own, Junior. Good luck.”

  “You can’t leave me here to die!” I shouted, and then I let the tears come. I didn’t care if he heard me cry.

  “Oh, !@#$%!” Ted turned around and locked his eyes with mine. “Leave it to me, Junior. I’ll find a way out of this.”

  When I looked in his eyes, I didn’t see panic. Just the opposite, in fact. It was like a sense of calm had come over him. Most people freak out when they’re in a stressful situation. With Ted Williams, the stress seemed to focus his attention on solving the problem at hand. I may have been about to die, but for some reason I felt safe with him at the controls.

  My nose and ears were stuffed up, but I could still smell something burning. Jet fuel? Were the tires on fire? Or was it something else? I tried to regain my composure. I looked out the window at the water on the left. Ted was looking out there too.

  “It’s frozen,” he said. “I’m not jumping outta this thing onto ice. I’d break every !@#$%! bone in my body. Not this boy.”

  On the right side, I saw another American bomber pulling up alongside us. He was so close, I could see the pilot making frantic hand gestures at Ted.

  “What’s he saying?” I asked.

  “He says I’m leaking fuel,” Ted replied. “We’re not gonna be able to make it back to base. We gotta land somewhere else.”

  The pilot of the other plane signaled for Ted to follow him. Ted replied with an OK sign and turned in the same direction.

  “Can anybody hear me?” he shouted into the radio. “I’ve got a wounded duck. One of my fuel lines has been hit.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked, not sure I wanted to hear the answer.

  The pilot was signaling for Ted to follow him.

  “This is an F-9 Panther with a centrifugal-flow engine,” Ted explained. “When it gets hit, the tail usually blows off. If that happens, you’ll get sucked out of there. And if the fuel pools at the bottom of the engine, you can kiss your !@#$%! good-bye, ’cause we’re gonna blow up.”

  “Oh, great!” I said, cursing my luck. “What are you gonna do?”

  But it was obvious what he was going to do. The other pilot went into a steep climb, and Ted followed him. Clouds were shooting past the window like signs on the highway.

  “He’s taking me higher,” Ted said. “Fire can’t burn in thin air. If we get high enough, we can glide 30 or 40 miles without the engines. Then maybe we can find a place to land.”

  The altimeter said we had leveled off at 25,000 feet. Ted took off his oxygen mask and told me he was going to turn off the hydraulics and try to steer manually.

  “Can you land it?” I asked.

  “We’re gonna find out, now aren’t we?” he replied. “In case I can’t, it’s been nice knowing you, Junior.”

  I said a silent prayer and tried to adjust my position so that I would be able to absorb the biggest possible impact when we landed. I noticed a trickle of blood coming out of Ted’s right ear.

  “There’s blood coming out of your ear,” I told him.

  “I know,” he replied. “It happens at high altitude. It’s my sinuses.”

  We followed the other plane for a few minutes and then the pilot turned slightly. Ted followed. We were slowly coming down. I didn’t say anything.

  “We crossed the border,” Ted said. “We’re in South Korea now. At least nobody will be shooting at us anymore. He’s leading me to another base. Looks like Suwon. K-13.”

  We continued gliding down, much more slowly. It was strangely quiet without the engines roaring. I wasn’t sure if Ted had turned them off or if we had leaked all our fuel. I just hoped we had been high enough to glide all the way down. Ted was pulling on the stick like he was trying to hold on to a bucking bronco.

  “The !@#$%! flaps don’t work,” he said. “The wheels won’t come down. If one of the wings comes off, we’re finished. You holding on to anything, Junior?”

  “Yeah.”

  The altimeter was dropping. 7,500 feet. 5,600 feet. 3,200 feet. 2,000 feet.

  Suddenly, it occurred to me that I didn’t have to sit there and let fate determine what was going to happen to me. I had a pack of new baseball cards with me! I could go back to my own time whenever I wanted. Holding on to the handle with one hand, I used the other one to fish around in my pockets. But I couldn’t find it.

  Looking out the canopy window in front, I could see what looked to be a landing strip in the distance. There were rows and rows of other planes on the ground. The only other plane in the air was the one that was escorting us down.

  The pilot of that plane signaled for Ted to lower his wheels. But when Ted pushed a button on the dashboard to do that, there was an explosion that shook the whole plane.

  “!@#$%!” Ted muttered.

  “What happened?” I yelled.

  “One of the !@#$%! wheel doors blew off!” he yelled back to me. “When we reduced our speed, it must have made the fuel pool up in the wheel wells.”

  There was a whooshing sound behind me; and when I turned around, all I could see were flames.

  “We’re on fire!” I yelled. “We’ve got to eject!”

  “Too late for that,” Ted shouted back. “We’re gonna have to crash-land this bucket of bolts, Junior.”

  “I’m gonna die!” I screamed. “Of all the ways you could die! I never thought—”

  “Will you shut up?” Ted yelled. “I’m trying to concentrate! We’ve got about 11,000 feet of runway to slide on.”

  “Is that long enough?” I asked.

  “We’re about to find out.”

  He looked calm, totally calm and focused. I grabbed the handles tighter. Even if I could find my baseball cards now, it might be too late to use one. We were coming in low, just barely clearing a fence that surrounded the base.

  “Here goes nothin’!” Ted hollered as we were about to touch ground.

  If the speedometer was working properly, we hit the runway at 225 miles per hour. It felt nothing like the few other times I had been on a plane. With no wheels, we hit the ground belly first, with a bump that bounced me a foot off the floor. I was still holding the handles on the sides. There was the awful sound of metal scraping against pavement. Everything was shaking. My teeth were vibrating in my mouth. I was afraid they were going to fall out.

  Ted mashed his foot on the brake and was pulling on the stick, but it wasn’t doing anything. We just had to let physics run its course—deceleration, momentum, and all those laws Newton figured out centuries ago.

  Pieces of the plane were flying off as we scraped along the runway. I could see flames, sparks, smoke, and debris out the back, because that part of the plane wasn’t there anymore. In the distance, I heard the siren from fire trucks speeding toward the runway.

  “Stop, you dirty !@#$%!” Ted was shouting. “When is this dirty son of a !@#$%! gonna stop? If there’s a Christ, this is the time old Teddy Ballgame needs you!”

  It felt like we were sl
iding along the ground forever. I was hoping and praying that we wouldn’t run out of runway.

  In front of us, I could see rice paddies and a Korean village. What a stupid place for there to be a village! Women and children were running for their lives to get out of the way.

  We slid off the runway, a little to the left. By that time, we had slowed down quite a bit, and the dirt and grass slowed us down even more. But we were still moving when Ted pulled an emergency lever to pop the cockpit canopy open. It flew off behind us. I felt the rush of air on my face.

  “Get out, Junior!” Ted shouted. “There still might be enough fuel left in this junker to blow!”

  The plane—or what was left of it, anyway—finally came to a stop just past the end of the runway. Ted somersaulted out of the hatch and rolled off to the right, out of sight.

  Acrid smoke filled my nose. The whole plane was in flames. The sleeve of my shirt was on fire! I jumped out, rolled a few times, and landed in a ditch on the opposite side of the plane from Ted.

  I had survived.

  As I lay in the ditch catching my breath, I planned my next move. I could stay here, I thought. Ted might take care of me. But what would be the point? It was 1953. I couldn’t stop Pearl Harbor, because it was already years in the past. And I couldn’t talk Ted out of joining the marines, because he was obviously already in the marines. I might as well try to get home.

  I fumbled around in my pockets again for my baseball cards. There they were! I ripped the pack open and pulled out a card. Fire trucks had arrived on the other side of the plane, and somebody was shooting foam stuff to snuff out the flames. But nobody could see me in the ditch.

  I closed my eyes and tried to put what happened out of my mind. I thought about going home. Back to the twenty-first century. Back to my house, where I would be safe. My own time.

  It didn’t take long. Soon I was feeling the tingling sensation in my fingertips. I breathed a sigh of relief. It was working. The buzzy feeling worked its way up my arm, across my chest, and down the other side. I began to feel light-headed, and I knew from experience that soon I would be gone.